Ten Miles Past Normal

Chapter Ten


The Ladies’ Sewing Circle and Anarchist Cookbook Society





When I get home, Avery is sitting at the kitchen table, tears streaming down her cheeks, her favorite pink T-shirt in tatters on the table in front of her. My mom stands next to her, looking defeated, a copy of Fabulous T-Shirt Makeovers in her left hand, a pair of scissors in her right.

“I don’t know what went wrong,” she says with a sigh when she sees me. “The book made it all look so simple.”

I put my backpack on a chair and pick up the shirt. It’s nearly impossible to see what my mother was trying to do, other than completely destroy it. Sensing my confusion, my mom says, “You’re supposed to cut off the bottom five inches and then sew a cute ribbon around the bottom of the remaining T-shirt and reattach the part of the T-shirt you’ve cut off by sewing it to the ribbon. Does that make sense?”

I squint, envision, and nod. “Yeah, I think so. Basically you’re inserting the ribbon as a band around the middle of the shirt.”

“Exactly!” My mom brightens at being understood. Then she frowns again. “Only I guess these scissors aren’t the best for cutting fabric.” She holds up the scissors for my inspection. They’re the ones she uses to cut pizza with. No wonder the shirt’s in tatters.

“Yeah, unless your fabric’s made out of, I don’t know, steel wool,” I say, unable to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

My mom looks hurt. “They were the only scissors I could find.”

“So do you want me to try to repair it?” I ask warily. It’s not like I want to do the Bobbsey Twins any favors, but even I can’t stand to watch a third grader cry.

Both my mom and Avery nod. Avery even manages a little smile and wipes a tear from her cheek. “I’ll let you keep Bowser on your bed all week if you fix it, Janie.”

Bowser is Avery’s stuffed . . . something. I can’t remember what Bowser used to be. All I know is that he’s in even worse shape than Avery’s shirt. “That’s okay,” I tell her, trying to sound nice about it. “You don’t have to give me anything. I’m happy to help.”

I pick up the various pieces of torn pink fabric, and my mom pulls some pink and green polka-dotted ribbon from a Jo-Ann’s bag along with a spool of pink thread. “Do you want to try the treadle machine?” she asks.

“I’m fine,” I tell her, and head up the stairs to my room. In my closet, I find the old Singer sewing machine passed down to me by my grandmother when I was eight. I drag it out and set it up on my desk. It’s a pretty low-tech machine, but it works. For a long time I made easy things like A-line skirts and cotton/polyester blend tees, but now for the most part, I don’t make new clothes on my sewing machine, I re-create old ones. This past summer I went through a serious cuff stage, where I bought cool vintage fabric off of eBay and made roll-up cuffs for all my jeans and shorts. More recently, I’ve had a “What can you do with a thrift shop men’s shirt?” stage and an “Is it possible to make a skirt out of a T-shirt?” stage (the answer being yes, if you know how to put in an elastic waistband).

As I move around the scraps of Avery’s T-shirt like puzzle pieces, figuring out the best way to put them back together, I think about last year and how in my group of friends—Sarah, Lauren, Sonia, Rebecca, and the two Hannahs—I was known as the creative one because of the stuff I did with my clothes. Sarah had the girl genius and world-changer thing going on, Lauren wore the title of Total Jock, and Sonia and Rebecca were band geeks. The two Hannahs weren’t really known for anything, which was part of their charm. They were like fans who cheered the rest of us on.

In fact, it occurs to me as I’m pinning fabric together, it’s possible that out of everyone in my old group of friends I miss the Hannahs most of all. It was nice to come to school and have one Hannah or the other make a big deal out of my latest creation. It made me feel special.

Of course, nowadays I feel as special as a speck of dust. Sarah, who’s the only one I see on a regular basis anymore, takes my clothes for granted. If I’m wearing a cool new pair of shoes, Sarah notices. A skirt I made out of an old pair of jeans and some killer fabric scraps? That’s old news to Sarah. Nothing was old news to the Hannahs.

I sigh and begin to snip around the ragged edges of the shirt’s hemline. In middle school, whenever I looked ahead to my high school years, I always saw myself in a crowd of friends. We were laughing and on our way some-where—to the pep rally or a football game—or walking through South Pointe Mall en masse. In my daydreams, our group had expanded to include boys, cute, funny, smart boys, boys who liked to tease and cut up in a crowd but who, one-on-one, could be thoughtful and serious.

Instead who do I get?

Monster Monroe.

In the first two months of high school, Monster is the only guy who’s paid me any attention at all. Well, there’s Jeremy Fitch, but he doesn’t really count. I’m not deluded enough to think that if Sarah and I stopped tracking Jeremy down at his locker, he would suddenly start showing up at ours. In fact, Jeremy has done an excellent job of being friendly without actually becoming a friend.

But as he walked me and Sarah down the C hallway this afternoon, Monster showed definite interest in being friends. He clearly didn’t know about my alter ego, the odiferous Farm Girl, or if he did, he didn’t care. He asked a ton of questions about what kind of music we listened to, shaking his head in violent disapproval at our vague answers. “Don’t tell me you listen to everything or ‘everything but country.’ That don’t mean nothing, and besides, what do you have against country music? I mean, what did Hank Williams ever do to you?”

And when we’d name bands, he wanted album titles, and when we named our favorite CDs, he wanted to know our favorite tracks.

By the time we got to the bus lanes, I was exhausted, but I definitely felt like Monster cared. Before he left us, he handed us his notebook and said, “Write your cell numbers in here, ’cause I might not be done asking you questions. If I’m gonna make you mix tapes, I got to know what I’m working with.”

I took the notebook from him and dug a pen out of my backpack. “You’re going to make me a mix tape too?”

“If you want to sing, you got to hear good singing. Judging by what you’ve just told me, I’m not convinced you have. Your mind’s full of Top Forty pop radio crap. You can’t learn to sing that way.”

I wrote down my cell number and passed the notebook to Sarah. “But I told you, I’m not sure I really want to sing.”

“What else you doing that’s so important?”

Now, that’s a good question. I sit down in front of the sewing machine, adjust the position of the foot pedal, and turn on the power. Maybe that’s my problem, I think, as I put the spool of thread on the spindle and pull the line of thread through the needle. I’m not doing anything important. I can’t even think of important things to do. I’m just Farm Girl, trailing the flotsam and jetsam of Green Acres behind me wherever I go. Really, all I want to do is live a normal life. I want to smell normal, look normal, act normal. I want to blend in. Why should that be such an unattainable goal?

Still, if I became that girl who sang on Fridays with the Jam Band, well, who knows where that might lead? Maybe I’ll end up one of those famous singers who’s always doing benefit events for important causes. I could do a Raising Awareness About Where Your Chocolate Comes From concert. At the very least, if I got the reputation as a Jam Band chick, maybe everybody in first period would forget about the day I came to school smelling like spoiled milk after Patsy Cline kicked the bucket over and soaked my socks thirty seconds before the bus driver started honking at the top of the driveway.

I mean, I could sing. Why not? Just because the first time Sarah and I stopped by the band room on a Friday after last period my voice froze in my throat before we even got to the door, it doesn’t mean I can’t sing. And just because the second Friday, when we swore this time we were going to go in and just watch the Jam Band, we chickened out at the last minute, that doesn’t mean I can’t sing either.

I just have to practice, that’s all. I’ll listen to Monster’s mix tape and learn. I’ll sing along with the singers and then turn off the CD and sing alone.

Once I get famous for my singing, then people will flock around me, asking me to join their clubs and come to their parties, and high school will be in the bag. Who knows, maybe I could convince my parents to move back into town, where I could live the normal teenage life of my dreams.

Before I drift too far off into never-never land, I press my foot to the pedal and start hemming Avery’s shirt.

My cell vibrates in my pocket. I can hear Sarah’s excitement before she even starts talking. “You have to come to dinner tonight!” she exclaims before I get the second syllable of “hello” out of my mouth.

“Um, okay,” I say. “But why?”

“So we can convince Emma to work on this project! My mom is totally into Emma helping us. She thinks it’ll get Emma back on the right path.”

“To where?”

“Who knows? Harvard, I guess. Or at least community college. Anywhere but a Harley-Davidson convention.”

It’s weird to think that after all these years we’ll finally be doing something with Emma—by which I mean, doing something that might actually involve personal interaction and dialogue. Sarah, Emma, and I have done stuff together—we’ve gone in the Lymans’ minivan to shopping malls and state fairs and movie theaters—but even though Emma was with us, she wasn’t really with us. Even when we were in first grade and Emma was in fourth, she seemed to be orbiting around her family instead of living inside of it.

Did she have friends when she was younger? I try to think of who Emma sat on the bus with when we all went to Sewall Elementary, but every picture my mind calls up is of Emma with her nose in a book—on the bus, on the playground, and walking down the hall. It wasn’t until she was in middle school that Emma started to be known for her interesting friendships, always with older kids, the kind your parents start warning you away from as early as third grade.

Sometimes when Emma was out doing who knows what with who knows who, Sarah and I would sneak into her room. It was surprisingly neat, with four tall bookshelves filled with books, and a desk free of clutter. “It’s how she gets away with so much,” Sarah told me once. “In our house, neatness counts for a lot.”

In middle school Emma kept a journal, which we found shoved underneath her pillow and of course read. We were in fifth grade and Emma was in eighth, and we figured Emma’s journal would be full of good stuff—stuff about boys and bras and periods (our obsessions at the time). Instead she’d written page after page about God. Did God exist? If God didn’t exist, what set the universe in motion? If God was good, why was there so much suffering? If only one religion was the right religion, wouldn’t God have done a better job of making that clear to everyone?

In other words, Emma’s diary was a huge disappointment. But later, when she stopped just being Emma, Sarah’s big sister, and became Emma Lyman, Famous Wild Child, I thought about all that stuff she’d written about when she was thirteen. Did she give up on God, or just the opposite? The minute Emma got her own car, she’d put a bumper sticker on it that read live large, and it occurred to me that if there is a God, that’s something He might want us to do.

So Emma lives large, but she lives in Emma World. Now, finally, maybe she’s going to take a step into Sarah and Janie World. It actually makes me sort of nervous, but I don’t mention this to Sarah, who has finally wound down about the project and has started on our new friendship with Monster Monroe.

“He’s cute, don’t you think? Not my type, but I could see how he could be somebody else’s type. I can’t believe he’s going to teach me how to play bass. I wonder what his house is like.”

Next Monday, after school, Monster is taking us to what he referred to as his “digs,” which are on the other side of Manneville, where he’s going to lend Sarah an old bass of his and teach her how to play. No matter how hard I try, I can’t envision the house that Monster Monroe might live in. He’s just too big for a house. An airplane hangar seems more the right size.

Avery appears at my doorway. “Are you done with my shirt?” she whispers, leaning into my room, but not actually crossing the threshold.

“Almost,” I whisper back, and Avery gives me a thumbs-up and scoots back down the hallway. I wonder if she looks up to me the way Sarah looks up to Emma. I don’t think so, at least not yet, and definitely not with my new bad attitude. Right now my mom is the big star in Avery’s world.

My glance falls on the pink T-shirt on my desk, its various scraps held together by pins. Yeah, my mom’s the center attraction now, but one more T-shirt disaster like this one, and her big-star days might be over.